up the phone right now.
Unless.
He put his head in his hands. God, no. Please. No.
He reached over and grabbed his phone off the comforter, scrolled through his recent calls until he found Rich’s number. He’d still be awake. From what Patrick could tell, his campaign manager never slept.
Rich picked up on the first ring. “Hey, champ! How’s California? Did you knock ’em dead?”
“The conference went fine. Look, I’m sorry to call you this late—”
“No apology necessary. You know I’m available to you twenty-four/seven.”
“I tried calling Rebecca at the house and she’s not answering. I think . . . I think we might have a situation on our hands.”
“Leave it with me. The wheels of justice are already in motion.”
“It might be nothing. She might be at home, asleep. She might have accidentally turned the ringer off or left the phone off the hook . . .” Even as he said the words, he knew they weren’t true. “I’m probably just wasting your time.”
“You did the right thing by calling. Now go get some shut-eye, okay? You’ve got an early flight tomorrow, and we need you looking fresh for the judge.”
“Could you let me know when you find her?”
The line went dead. Patrick cradled the phone in his hand for a minute before placing it on the nightstand and walking across the room to the minibar. He took out a couple of miniatures, poured them into a glass, and bolted the whole thing. And then got down on his knees and began to pray.
Clovis, New Mexico—222 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait knew a lot of people who didn’t like driving—they hated the road rage and the boredom and the stiff necks and the pins-and-needles legs—but she enjoyed it, especially once she was clear of the city and out on the open road. There were times when she would be steering straight on one of these wide Texan roads for hours, staring at the dotted white line leading all the way to the horizon, and a Zen-like calm would come over her. It was the closest she’d come to meditating. She had used one of those apps once—a woman’s voice in her ear, telling her to picture crashing waves or fields of wildflowers—but as hard as she tried, she kept thinking about all the shit she could be doing instead, and eventually, she switched it off and made a to-do list and went to bed.
You could take the girl out of Waco, but you couldn’t make her believe in new-age-wellness horseshit, she guessed.
Out on the road, her mind would empty until it was just the sound of the engine and the feel of the Jeep hurtling forward through space. Sometimes she imagined herself in the car as a single still point in the universe while the rest of the world rushed past. She liked those moments the best, though after a while it started doing weird things to her head, like one of those Magic Eye paintings they ran in the newspaper when she was a kid, and she’d have to squeeze her eyes shut for a second to reset.
Mainly, though, she liked the fact that driving was the only time she was ever truly, genuinely alone. At the bar, she was a sitting duck for whatever lonely soul happened to wander in looking for a drink and a little small talk, and when she wasn’t serving customers, she was laughing politely at the manager’s bad jokes or hassling the barbacks for fresh ice. Even in her cramped one-bedroom apartment, she never lost the sense of being surrounded by people. The walls were thin, and every time her neighbors made a smoothie or had sex or went to the bathroom, she could hear it, loud and clear. The sounds of other people’s lives were with her all the time, pushing their way into her head.
In the Jeep, there was silence. It was like floating in her own little bubble, untouchable, even when she was sharing the road with hundreds of other cars. Even now, with Rebecca sitting silently next to her staring out the window, she could almost pretend she was on her own. Almost.
Cait pulled off at the exit for the first town she’d seen since crossing the border into New Mexico, then steered the Jeep through the deserted streets to the glowing blue-and-red smile of an IHOP sign. “Here okay?” she asked, already pulling into a space in a lot that was empty except for a pickup truck and a beat-up El